When the Flood Falls

by J. E. Barnard

  “Probably some last-minute emergency at the museum. He was uncrating exhibits when I left this afternoon. Maybe one of them was damaged, and he’s got to mess around filing insurance claims and getting photo­graphers out there and stuff. Fine art insurance is killer.”

  He turned at the door. “I know you’re really wired when you talk about art as if you still had a job.”

  “You shit!” Jan slammed the last pot into the sudsy water.

  After a pause he said, “Sorry. That was insensitive.”

  While he was in the garage getting his boots, she forced herself to breathe in deeply and then breathe out slowly to a four count to temporarily calm her raging brain and ragged nerves. Why was he hating these pills? Or maybe it wasn’t the pills, just the situation. Terry’s SAR gear was in the van, which she had abandoned because she hadn’t managed her energy or medication properly this afternoon. He already ran his life around her needs, and this one night a week he liked to go out and test his fitness, away from her endless small requests for help. No wonder he was irked about not having his gear. Not about the pills at all, but about maybe missing his one night out. And he thought her brain wasn’t working. Hah.

  When he came back she said, “You’re right, Rob’s late. And I’m sorry I left the van this afternoon. Will you miss anything important if you don’t get there right at seven?”

  He looked at her warily for a moment, then accepted her peace offering. “Just the rope-and-harness review, and I’m not leading it tonight, thank god. Some of those bozos couldn’t tie a knot to hang themselves with. Heaven protect any lost climber who depends on them for rescue.”

  She squinted once more out the window. “I see the van now.”

  Soon Rob came scrambling in the patio doors, his artful dark hair still frosted with construction dust. “Sorry I’m late. Absolutely fatal day at the museum. Jan, honey, how are you doing? I expected to find you comatose on the sofa.”

  “She took a magic pill,” said Terry, yanking his second bootlace tight. “You coming, or will you walk down to your car later?”

  “Almost there, dear boy. Honey, we have a crisis. Since you’re wide awake and thinking straight, can you please bend your mind to how we can hang the opening show when our insurer won’t sign off until the vault is ready? I can’t bring paintings in without insurance, and you know it’s disastrous if the donors and loaners don’t see their darlings on the walls on Friday.”

  “The vault’s not done? I thought it was finished today.”

  “You were crashed when the bad news hit. Not only is the temperature control still not working, but the racks are hypersensitive. Wayne put the bottom floor on lockdown for safety reasons.”

  At the door, Terry cleared his throat.

  “Oh, coming,” said Rob. “Anyway, call Dee if you have a light-bulb moment. I gave her the inside scoop this afternoon, although Camille got to her, too.”

  “That woman is a menace.”

  “That she is. I’m utterly thrilled you’re standing tall, hon. Dare I hope you’ll come finish your tour tomorrow?”

  “Not tomorrow,” said Terry. “She’ll be sleeping off the magic pill. And you’ll be the test subject in a noose demonstration if you don’t get your ass back in the van.” He walked out. Rob gave Jan a bemused quirk of his eyebrow.

  She shrugged. “He’s on a hair-trigger today. At first I thought it was the pills, but now?”

  “Could be he’s just tired of getting his hopes up, honey. You’ve been around this treadmill so often since you got sick.” Rob darted across the room and kissed her temple. “Cheer up. If it works, it works. Even if it works part of the time, it’s better than before. Right?” The van’s horn tooted and he hurried out.

  Quiet descended. Jan sloshed at the last few dishes, but could not get drawn in again by the play of light on bubbles. No matter how wired her brain was, her body was using up energy her cells couldn’t replace quickly enough. She dragged her afghan out to the deck and nestled down on a lounger to watch the sunset. Bird calls trickled up from Dee’s treetops below. The fragrance of roses drifted down from Jake Wyman’s gardens up the hill. The evening ahead seemed alternately a beautiful dream and unbearably slow. Every time she thought she was comfortable, some muscle somewhere would twitch or tense up and she’d have to shift position. Her mind ran over and over the same old things. Could she have handled Terry better? Why was it on her to handle him, anyway? But could she have said something nicer? He was clearly at the end of his rope over her illness. Like she wasn’t? It was her life and career in the crapper. Round and round and round until she was ready to scream, “Change the playlist, damn it!”

  She needed, craved, a mental challenge to distract her. Maybe she could come up with a solution for Rob. She knew almost as much as he did about the selections he’d made for the opening show, and she had five years’ more experience dealing with fine art insurers back when she still had a job. That thought triggered a rerun of Terry’s snarky comment and she briefly lost track of her new goal. She forced herself off the lounger and leaned over the railing to see if Dee’s SUV was still in her drive. If the dogs and the vehicle were home, so was Dee.

  Soon she was huffing a bit on the gentle uphill slope of Dee’s driveway. The dogs heard her coming and waited patiently, quietly, as usual sensing her need for a less boisterous welcome. After a short rest on the steps, she made her way around to their pen. They covered her hands in sloppy kisses and shoved their heads over the fence for ear scratches, whuffing in their chests as her fingers found the sweet spots. Doggy breath mingled with the scent of sun-warmed spruce. Behind her, a door opened.

  “I thought I heard someone,” said Dee. “You didn’t walk down, did you? It’s been ages since you could do that.”

  “I did walk.” Jan came up on the terrace. “I’m all buzzed from those stimulants the doctor wanted me to try. Seeing how far I can push myself.”

  “You’re walking farther? You want me and the dogs to come along, help you get home again?”

  “Nope. I’m here to rescue your opening-night show, find a way to finesse the insurance.”

  “You pull that off and I’ll give you a luxury weekend in an all-natural health spa.” Dee led the way indoors and plugged in the kettle. “Too bad Lacey isn’t back. She’ll know what’s up with the vault.”

  “That woman who works for the security installer? She’s coming here?” Just great. On top of the pills and the near fight with Terry, now a woman who thought Jan was a drug addict. If only the walk down had not left her legs quivering like manic jellyfish, she could have headed home right this minute. Maybe after a rest.

  “Yeah. I invited her to stay a while. We were roommates in university.”

  “How soon will she be here?”

  “Not sure. She’s picking up her stuff in Calgary. She said she’d met you?”

  “Yes.” The nasty cow called me a drug addict, practically to my face. I can only imagine what she said about me. “She seems a bit … brusque.”

  “She didn’t used to be that way,” said Dee. “But she just left the RCMP, and I think being a cop really hardened her — the outer shell, at least. That’s partly why I invited her to stay for a few weeks. The old Lacey is still in there, but she’ll need some space to sort of depressurize. To stop thinking like a cop first and a person second.” She waved Jan into the vast living room. “Sit here. You may be feeling great, but my aching bones need my comfy chair.”

  “It all depends on these two gallery entrances,” said Jan a few minutes later, pointing to the curling corner of a blueprint. “If they’re fully covered, the insurance requirement is satisfied for anything in there. If Rob only brings in the exact paintings he’s chosen for the opening show, they can all go straight into the gallery. The rest can stay in Calgary until the vault’s fixed. You’ll pay for the extra week’s storage, but that won’t be as bad
in the long run as pissing off Jake and all his oil baron buddies on Friday night.”

  “That’s almost too easy,” said Dee. “I see Lacey’s car coming up. She can tell us pretty quick if the gallery can be ready.”

  Jan glared out the window. Her legs were rested, hopefully enough to get her home. She could cut out now, avoid the McCrae woman’s judgments and silent sneers. But before she could make an excuse, the dogs went ballistic in their pen. Dee hurried out, calling over her shoulder, “I’ve got to shut them down before Camille phones to bitch again. Do the tea, will you?”

  Too late for an unobtrusive exit. In the kitchen Jan pulled mugs from the cupboard and the tea box from its shelf, wondering how often she would visit this familiar room after tonight. She and Dee had only gotten to know each other properly after Dee’s accident. Apart from Camille Hardy, whose notion of friendship did not include any women with interests beyond hair, nails, and clothing, they were the only women on this road. They’d kept each other company during some short, cold days and many long, dark evenings of the winter. Would their friendship survive the arrival of Dee’s old friend? She brought the mugs to the living room as Dee and Lacey came in the front door, and smiled politely while Dee made the re-introductions. “I hear you’ll be staying for a while,” she said, trying to keep the anxiety and anger out of her voice.

  “Yes, a while,” said Lacey, with an odd glance at Dee. “Dee says you have an idea to save the opening show. I’ll be glad to pass it on to Wayne if it’s at all feasible.”

  “Hopefully you can tell us that,” said Dee. “Show her, Jan, while I get the teapot.”

  Jan nodded. “You’ll have gathered by now that the insurance runs on kind of a points system. All we have to do is up the points on the main gallery and keep the pictures in there.”

  “Okay …”

  “Wayne didn’t explain any of this?”

  Lacey shook her head. Jan paced while she tossed out the basic information about fine art security that anyone working in the field ought to have known. To be fair, the woman was new at her job, but it was hard to cut her any slack. She hadn’t cut Jan any, just made a snap judgment about the pills and reported it to her boss as fact.

  Dee came back with the teapot. “Do you have a plan to fix the gallery?”

  “We got a little sidetracked,” said Jan, pushing aside the plans to make room on the coffee table. “Anyway, Lacey, the main gallery upstairs doesn’t have enough layers of security as it is now. Just the locked main door, right? A glass one, so it could be broken through.”

  “Yes, and the cameras. But it’s good enough for those pottery and glass things in the next gallery. They’ve been up there for a week.”

  “Those are new ones, by local artists.” If this woman couldn’t tell the difference between a pot fired yesterday and a hundred-year-old painting by a Canadian master, she had no business working in an art museum.

  Dee frowned at the plans. “Round-the-clock security will run into big bucks.”

  “Rent-a-cops make that much?” Lacey leaned forward. “Maybe I should try that after all.”

  “The companies that rent them out make a bundle,” Dee corrected. “The guards don’t. We’d need two shifts per night, two guards per shift, say ten thousand for a week. Hell on the budget. And someone has to set up their routines and check up on them and so on, costing more valuable time. Three days to the opening gala and now this.”

  Jan abandoned the struggle to sit still. She paced to the fireplace and around the sofas over there, shaking her fingers, her words coming almost faster than her brain could keep up with.

  “If we can harden the gallery sufficiently, Rob will need half a day at the storage vault to personally verify each painting’s accession number and make sure it gets onto the truck. Leaving it up to the storage folks risks getting a wrong picture, one that won’t fit in the wall layout or whatever. We can do it. I can help him.”

  Dee looked at her funny but only said, “So what can we do to the gallery? Cameras inside as well as on the doors?”

  “Not enough.” Jan made a second, faster lap of the living room.

  “Cameras and motion sensors?”

  “Nope. Those are the same thing, they record what’s going on but don’t do anything to stop it. There’s gotta be a way. Gotta be a way.”

  “Jan! Sit down. You’re making me dizzy.”

  “Oh, sorry. Wired.” Jan’s voice came out too high, too fast, and she wound it down with an effort. The security woman had that bad-smell look again. “Better call Terry. Get him to take me home.”

  “But we don’t have a gallery plan yet,” Dee pointed out. “Look, sit down and drink your tea. That will calm you.”

  “Calm me. Yes.” Jan sat and sipped her tea, but her brain was still zooming around. Around and around and around. Too bad it couldn’t fly to the top of the hill and back. Maybe a quick pass over the Wyman estate would tire it out. Wyman. Jerking forward, she slopped her tea. “Jake Wyman! He has live wireless monitoring 24-7. How hard would it be to tie in the gallery cameras to his monitoring system for a week?”

  Dee wiped up the spilled tea with a napkin before it reached the building plans. “Lacey?”

  “I don’t know.” Lacey put down her teacup. “I’m too new to this work. But if it could be done, why would he let the museum piggyback on his security system?”

  Jan giggled. “He would do more than that if Dee asked him.”

  Dee gave her a look. “He’s only being friendly. It’s because we’re both newly divorced in this community of couples.”

  “Whatever.” Jan found herself looking right at Lacey for pretty much the first time all night. “Anyway, he will because he has a lot invested in seeing the museum succeed. It’s got two million dollars of his money in it already. Plus he convinced some of his oil buddies to cough up artworks out of their personal collections. Modern hockey art mostly, but there’s a huge Joe Cadot canvas to anchor the north wall, that’s being brought over from some horsey place near Spruce Meadows.” She was talking too fast again. She took another big swallow of tea, wondering if Lacey had ever heard of the self-taught Métis painter who some critics called the prairies’ answer to the whole Group of Seven. Her mind skittered off on a tangent, totting up other prairie painters she’d include in a mythical group. William Kurelek? The Regina Five? But they were abstract artists, not landscape. W.L. Stevenson from Calgary. Who was that other Métis painter? The other Joe … Her mind had stopped answering. She looked up to find that the conversation had moved on without her.

  “Jake is a retired oilman,” Dee was telling Lacey, “and a major hockey fan.”

  “With poor taste in wives.” Jan giggled. “At least the last one. She was board president before Dee, and she got him to donate to the museum to get it started. Then she ran off with a pro hockey player. From a team Jake owned, too, just to rub it in. She and Camille Hardy were best pals, pease in porridge.” There was something wrong with that comparison, but she couldn’t figure it out. “That log monstrosity on the corner down there? That’s Camille’s.” She gave an exaggerated shudder, grinning at Dee. “Dee just loves being on the board with Camille.”

  Dee made a face. “Camille thinks her ideas ought to carry as much weight with me as they did with our esteemed ex-president. I pity her husband. He and Jake both got played by hot, young blondes. But this gossip isn’t getting the gallery sorted.”

  Lacey topped up her teacup. “What will the overnight security be after the museum is operational? They won’t move all the paintings back to the vault every night, will they?”

  Dee groaned. “My god, you’re right. The overnight electronic monitoring of the galleries is scheduled to start Thursday. We can just add a few nights to that contract instead. Why didn’t I think of that?”

  Because I came down here in a tizzy, Jan thought, feeling suddenly deflated. Rob had
not intended her to get all fired up. She should have stayed home and rested, so she could help him out by going to Calgary to make sure the storage place packed up the right artworks. That would have been much better for all concerned. She stood up slowly, feeling the familiar tremors creeping down her thighs. The pill’s illusion of strength was wearing off.

  Dee drove her the two hundred feet up the road that she had walked down with relative vigour only an hour before. The sunset was more beautiful, the bird calls softer, the evening breeze sweeter still, and she was falling fast back into the abyss from which the magic pill had yanked her this afternoon. Jan tried to apologize for getting wound up, to explain how the pill and the desire to feel competent again had pushed her. But the old disconnect was back between her brain and her mouth, and the sentence she planned vanished in the middle of a word. Dee knew this kind of thing happened, had accepted it as part of Jan. But now she had a choice of friends. Why would she choose to hang around with someone who couldn’t even finish a sentence without being jacked up on Adderall?

  Jan said goodnight and crept into her house feeling even more stupid, more a waste of space than she had this afternoon. There was nothing left to do but retreat to the sunroom, cuddle into her afghan, and try to rest until Terry came home. He’d be eager to tell her about his evening. At least she could act like a good wife for a few minutes, if she could stay alert that long. From peak performance to a dead crawl in the last twenty minutes. The pill gave a spiteful twitch to her spine, and she sat up with a gasp.

  “Take only half the pill next time,” she said out loud, and leaned back down with a faint smile.

  Chapter Six

  Later that evening, squinting against the sunlight from her bedroom window, Lacey tossed her second knapsack’s worth of work clothes into drawers. After stashing her small toiletry kit in the nearest bathroom, she checked the other rooms on the top floor more thoroughly than she had the night before. Two more bedrooms, a lounge area overlooking the vast living room, and the huge master suite at the other end, overlooking the garage. The best view down onto the deck was from Dee’s ensuite, a room larger than Lacey’s kitchen in B.C. It wasn’t ideal, but if the lights came on, they could see anyone escaping up to the trail. Lacey’s room looked down the driveway. She was pretty sure the tangled underbrush around the spruce trees would keep anyone from running off that way, although they might dive into it to avoid the lights and creep away later.